Barking

by Tom Holt

  Duncan tried to think about that, but it proved to be too big for his head; and besides, they were back at the office. In the lift, nobody spoke; but Micky leaned across him and picked another glass shard out of his hair. When the doors opened, the pack dispersed, leaving him standing by the front desk.

  The little old man, he noticed, was looking at him furtively. He gave him a friendly smile. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I’m Duncan Hughes. I’ve just joined the partnership.’

  The little old man’s eyes opened wide, and he shivered a little, as if he’d just been caught by a chilly draught. Maybe he said something, but all Duncan heard, even with his amazing new hearing, was a vague little squeak.

  Even so. ‘Luke Ferris told me your name,’ he went on, ‘but I’m ashamed to say I’ve forgotten it.’

  No reply. The little old man was completely motionless, like a rabbit caught in the glare of headlights. Duncan wasn’t quite sure what to make of that, but it seemed fairly obvious that the little old man wanted him to go away, so he smiled vaguely and headed for his office. Halfway down the first long corridor he realised that he couldn’t remember how to get there, but he found it quite easily by listening out for the distinctive tick of his wall clock.

  While he’d been out, someone had collected his post tray. There were also two yellow while-you-were-out notes, stuck to the receiver of his phone.

  Please call Imogen Bick, Crosswoods, urgent; followed by the number.

  He frowned. He’d been warned off having anything to do with Crosswoods, hadn’t he? Even werewolf concentration couldn’t clarify that one, so he looked at the other note.

  Felicity Allshapes, re Bowden Allshapes deceased.

  Odder still. The Allshapes file was part of his ridiculous, pre-transformation past. Mostly it was a set of estate accounts that refused to balance, along with a gang of beneficiaries who didn’t seem to care a damn that years had gone by and they hadn’t had a penny of their money. Felicity Allshapes, he remembered, was one of these. He’d never met her or spoken to her on the phone; he’d sent her interim bills, which she’d dutifully approved by return of post, but that was all he knew about her. He reached out and tapped in her number.

  ‘Thanks for calling back.’ She had a nice voice, anyway. ‘I gather you’ve left Craven Ettins.’

  ‘Yes.’ He felt an urge to confess that he’d been fired, and only just resisted it.

  ‘A bit sudden, wasn’t it?’

  ‘A rather good opportunity came along,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, splendid. Congratulations. Anyhow,’ Ms Allshapes went on, ‘I’ve been talking to the other beneficiaries, and we all think it’d make much more sense if you carried on looking after Uncle’s estate for us, since you’ve done all the work on it so far. I mean,’ she went on, ‘where’s the sense in someone new having to read all the letters and stuff, when you know it all already? Besides, you said in your last letter that it was all very nearly sorted out, so—’ She paused, apparently expecting enthusiastic agreement. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Duncan replied. ‘If that’s what you want, then yes, fine’ Being a werewolf didn’t seem to have improved his people skills. Pity. ‘Of course, you’ll have to get Craven Ettins to send us the file, and I imagine there’ll be a final bill to settle.’

  ‘Oh, that’s no problem. Can you write us a letter we can all sign to ask them to give you the paperwork? I’ll just give you my address.’

  Should be flattered, he thought; for some reason, they like me, or at least they think I’m competent. (But now, of course, he really was competent. Quite possibly, his werewolf superpowers would make him able to balance the bloody accounts.) Even so, there was something about it that disturbed him, and he felt hackles rise on the back of his neck; a bit like an ache in the tooth you had out last year.

  Which left the other message. He read it again. Crosswoods. Urgent. Oh well, he thought; if I can’t be bruised by tables or blinded by smashed glass, I don’t suppose there’s an awful lot Crosswoods can do to me.

  He dialled the number, and they let him listen to music for a while, which was nice of them, before putting him through to Ms Bick.

  ‘You left Cravens, then.’

  He sighed. ‘Actually, they fired me,’ he replied. ‘But I got lucky. An old school friend, actually. Gave me a partnership in this outfit. Seems all right, though it’s only my first day, of course. What can I do for you?’

  A silence at the other end of the line gave him a clear impression of what Ms Bick thought about divine justice. ‘Fell on your feet, didn’t you?’ she said, but there was a sort of cautious awe in her voice. ‘Well, that’s neither here nor there. It’s not about work, actually. I wanted to know when you last heard from Sally.’

  Sally. Sally? Oh, yes, right. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘she rang me. Night before last, I think.’ He grinned. ‘It’s been a busy few days, so I’m a bit vague about details.’

  ‘The night before last,’ she said. ‘Damn.’

  ‘Is something the—?’

  ‘Well, I thought I’d try you just in case, you being the ex. But—’ Sigh. ‘Sorry to have bothered you, then.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ he said, just a bit louder and more forcefully. Practically a growl, in fact.

  Ms Bick sighed impatiently. ‘If you must know,’ she said, ‘she’s disappeared.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It was a last-step-of-the-escalator moment. ‘What do you mean, disappeared?’ Duncan said.

  ‘Gone. Not there.’ At the other end of the wire, Ms Bick clicked her tongue, and Duncan instinctively sat up straight in his chair. ‘I don’t mean vanished in a puff of smoke or put on the Ring or anything like that. She left the office at a quarter past ten yesterday morning, telling Reception she was just nipping out to buy a pound of liver, and that’s the last anybody’s seen of her. She’s not at her flat, her mobile’s switched off and she’s not answering texts or e-mails, and her car’s sitting in the underground car park in Bat Street with a big yellow ornament on its front offside wheel. That sort of disappeared.’ Pause, while Ms Bick refrosted. ‘We thought she might have been to see you,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘She’s been talking about you,’ Ms Bick said. ‘Quite a bit, lately. More than usual.’

  You can do it in several different ways. You can stick a sheet of six-inch-thick glass across the fast lane of a motorway, or you can breed pterodactyl-sized pigeons and train them to precision-crap on people’s heads from a thousand feet; or three little words can have the same effect.

  ‘More than usual?’

  ‘Yes. So we thought, well, maybe you two had sort of got back together . . .’

  (If only they’d stop messing about with nuclear physics and putting men on Mars, and knuckle down to the job of perfecting the video phone; then Duncan could have seen the look of embarrassed revulsion he knew Ms Bick was wearing when she said that.)

  ‘Well, no,’ Duncan replied. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Oh.’ Long pause. ‘In that case, sorry to have bothered you.’

  ‘No problem.’ He hesitated. ‘Quarter past ten yesterday, you said.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Does she do that sort of thing? Go off suddenly, I mean.’

  ‘No.’ She made it sound as if he’d implied something disgusting. ‘And she’s got a diary as long as your arm, and she’s really conscientious about appointments. That’s what’s so—’

  ‘I see.’ Duncan unleashed the full power of his werewolf brain. ‘You don’t think she’s been in an accident, do you? Have you—?’

  ‘Tried the hospitals, yes. And the police, and the airports and the ferry terminals.’

  That gave him pause for thought. ‘Ah. What about—?’

  ‘And the leading health spas, rehab clinics, monastic retreats, all that. And the Air Force.’

  Duncan blinked. ‘Air Force?’

  ‘For reports of unidentified flying objects, in case she’s be
en abducted by aliens.’

  ‘Oh,’ Duncan said. If he’d been a cartoon character, a little halo of singing birds would have circled his head at that point. ‘Right. No joy there, either?’

  ‘No. Anyway, you’ve been a great help, good—’

  ‘Hang on.’ Not quite sure why, but: ‘When she turns up, could you let me know?’

  Two-second Ice Age. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, I’m concerned, naturally.’

  ‘Oh.’ Three seconds. ‘All right, then. But don’t call us, all right? Wait till we call you.’

  Bzzzz. Duncan put the phone down. He’d said it, he realised, almost as if he’d meant it. I’m concerned, he’d said, naturally. But he wasn’t, of course. He hated the bloody woman. After all, she’d screwed up his life (his other, his pre-bite life; had that really been him, that passive and unsatisfactory creature, now mercifully extinct?) before walking out of it for ever, making it plainly, viciously clear that she never wanted to see or hear from him ever again, not until the skies fell and the seas ran dry and the dead were raised incorruptible. Nothing natural, therefore, about being concerned about her, except in a vague, woolly, no-man-is-an-island sort of a way, the concern a normal person feels for whales stranded in the Thames estuary. The right to worry about her had been taken away from him years ago, after all.

  He leaned back in his impossibly comfortable chair and closed his eyes. Without quite realising he was doing it, he was listening; as though his extraordinary hearing might be able to pick up her voice, faint and distant, moaning ‘Help!’ somewhere. Not that he cared, of course. Quite the reverse. If something bad had happened to her, he’d want to know about it, of course, so he could gloat, possibly revise his hitherto negative opinion of cosmic justice. Other than that, couldn’t care less. Honest.

  And then the penny, burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere, streaked across his plane of vision like a shooting star. She’d gone out at a quarter past ten yesterday, that foul woman had said, to buy a pound of liver. Strange behaviour, all things considered, on the part of the most adamant and proselytising vegetarian he’d ever met in his life.

  Sometimes, conclusions are like bits of driftwood floating past a sinking ship; we leap to them for our very survival. Think about it. She wasn’t likely to be buying liver for herself. Therefore, inevitably, she was buying it for someone else. Further: if she was prepared to defile herself with the flesh of murdered animals, it could only be because there was someone whose heart she was anxious to short-cut to via his stomach. Apparently, Ms Bick’s guess hadn’t been so wide of the mark. He quickly pieced together a storyline: unexpected phone call (on her mobile, so it didn’t go through Reception). Darling, I’ll be stopping off in London on my way to LA, but I’ve only got thirty-six hours; drop everything, quick dash to the butcher for the makings of his favourite liver, bacon and onions, then a fast taxi to his penthouse flat - You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes or a werewolf to figure that one out.

  Duncan frowned. Not that he cared any more. He was tempted to phone up Ms Bick and share his insight with her, but he decided against it, if only because he didn’t relish the prospect of getting frostbite in his ear. She was a smart girl, she’d figure it out for herself sooner or later. Besides, if his hypothesis was right, Sally would be back at work in a day or so, smiling a lot and walking awkwardly. Problem solved. The whole issue flushed from his mind.

  His mouth, he discovered, was full of little crumbs of wood, all that remained of a perfectly good pencil. He spat them out. It’d have been nice to have some work to do right now, to take his mind off the whole tiresome business; some nice, difficult work, something he could really chew on. Right now, in fact, he could even tackle the Allshapes estate accounts—

  Which reminded him.

  One of those little things, like bits of grit in the corner of your eye. How had Felicity Allshapes found out so quickly that he’d left Craven Ettins? Furthermore, how had she known that he’d joined Ferris and Loop?

  Particularly the latter; because he knew for a fact that he hadn’t called up his old employers to share the happy news with them, and he doubted very much whether Luke would have done so, unless it was some fine detail of professional etiquette, the sort of thing senior partners do when they’re not nibbling canapes and swigging Bollinger. But presumably he had; or else how come Ms Bick had known where to find him?

  Another insoluble mystery solved, ahead of schedule and within budget. Duncan relaxed. Away in the distance, up against the opposite wall of his office, he noticed for the first time a large padded thing, a cross between a paddling pool and a coracle but made out of foam rubber covered in soft, warm fabric, inside which someone had thoughtfully placed a delightful-looking old blanket. It seemed to call to him, promising warmth, comfort and safety; so much nicer than this horrible, limb-cramping chair. He stood up and walked across the room.

  (This is silly, he thought. Whoever heard of a grown man curling up in a doggy-bed at three o’clock in the afternoon? But it looked so soft and cuddly, and the blanket so gorgeously fuzzy and frayed—)

  Without knowing that he was doing it, he got down on his hands and knees and approached the padded thing warily. When his nose was about six inches from it, he stopped and sniffed.

  He felt his ears twitch. There was something about the smell; that who’s-been-sleeping-in-my-bed blend of apprehension and annoyance. He was new to all this stuff, of course; but he knew enough to recognise the scent of his own kind. The last occupant of the bed had, beyond question, been One of Us. That, however, didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

  He hadn’t been conscious of uploading the information, but he knew the scents of the rest of the Ferris Gang. The whole building was filled with them; so much so that he could have drawn a diagram showing which rooms each of them had been in over the last week, with detailed itineraries and timings. The smell from the bed, however, most definitely wasn’t Luke (a sort of fiery dark red with cinnamon and a hint of tenor saxophone) or any of the others. He could hear a low growling noise, which he quickly traced back to himself.

  Silly. So somebody else had slept in it at some stage: so what? Did this mean he’d never be able to stay at a hotel ever again without barking himself hoarse? He sniffed a little more, but the lure of the bed had evaporated and he went back to his chair and picked up the phone.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, and dried. Luke had told him Reception’s name, but it had slithered out of his mind like a wise fish in a net. ‘You there?’

  Someone at the other end of the line squeaked.

  ‘Great.’ He was finding the conversation a bit trying, but he soldiered on. ‘I was wondering if you could do something for me.’ Squeak; oh, for crying out loud. ‘Come in here,’ he said firmly, ‘and, um, get rid of something.’

  That made him sound like a little boy scared of spiders. He put the phone down, and a few seconds later the little bald man from the front office knocked at his office door.

  ‘That bed thing,’ Duncan said, pointing. ‘Chuck it out, would you?’

  The little man stared at him as if he’d just been ordered to woodchip over the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. ‘Squeak?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Duncan said. ‘If you’d just get rid of it. Throw it out, or,’ he added, as the little man’s eyes widened like sunflowers, ‘stick it in a cupboard somewhere out of my way. Thanks.’

  The man stood there. He was quivering slightly.

  Duncan sighed. ‘Here,’ he said. He stood up, went across and picked the padded thing up. ‘Take it,’ he said. The little man stared at him sadly, so he shoved it into his arms. ‘Thanks,’ he said; then, as the little man seemed rooted to the spot, ‘Go away,’ he added. That worked, at any rate; the little man walked backwards to the doorway, then turned and scuttled away, leaving the door wide open.

  Strange. But strangeness was the livery around here. Other firms had monogrammed carpets or colour-coordinated open plan, Ferris & Loop had weird. He yawn
ed. He really did fancy a little nap, after the day’s exertions. Pity about the padded thing, really. He could see how comfortable one of those could be, for a busy man in need of a quarter of an hour’s down time.

  He looked up. The little bald man was back again. Only the shiny top of his head was visible. The rest of him was obscured by a colossal quantity of pink, blue and green wallet files.

  ‘Hello,’ Duncan said, trying a bit too hard to sound breezy and relaxed. ‘What’ve you got there?’

  No reply. The little man dumped the stack of files down on a table that Duncan hadn’t got around to noticing yet, stared at him for a moment, then fled. At least this time he remembered to shut the door.

  Ah well, Duncan thought, then frowned. One pink, green or blue file looks pretty much the same as any other, but there was something familiar about these specimens. He advanced quietly and carefully, as though stalking wary prey, until he could read—

  - His own handwriting on the cover of the file on top of the heap: Bowden Allshapes dec’d. There was a single sheet of A4 folded under the flap.

  Dear Mr Hughes,

  Further to our phone conversation, I have asked Craven, Ettin & Trowell to forward the files to you ASAP. My fellow beneficiaries and I look forward to hearing from you in due course, although naturally there’s no rush.

  Cordially yours,

  Felicity Allshapes

  Ask, apparently, and it shall be delivered unto you by Federal Express. It’d have been fun, he thought, to have been a werefly on the wall when the Sidmouth woman found out that one of her department’s files was being snatched away from under her nose. She hated it when that happened. He smiled.